An early Amazon investor was a Pacific Northwest technology champion – GeekWire

Tom Alberg, a Seattle business and civic leader who was instrumental in creating industries from e-commerce to wireless communications, died peacefully at home on Friday. He was 82.

A Pacific Northwest technology investor, attorney and champion, Alberg was nationally known for his early investment in Amazon and his longtime role on the company’s board. But in his beloved hometown of Seattle, his legacy goes beyond helping launch one of the most influential companies in the world.

Alberg was a prominent attorney for aerospace and technology companies and an executive vice president of McCaw Cellular Communications, a telecom company. Madrona Venture Group, a venture capital powerhouse, has boosted the growth of well-known technology companies in the region. He was central to the creation of the Alliance of Angels, giving countless startups a chance at long-term success.

Through it all, Alberg developed a reputation as a visionary, a key behind-the-scenes player in regional business and civic initiatives, a natural optimist and a humble mover and mover steeped in the promise of the future.

“Tom saw something in Amazon before most people did,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wrote in a 2020 letter marking Madrona’s 25th anniversary.

“I think because he shared my vision that the Internet is a disruptive force that can improve business and people’s lives,” he said. “We used to sell books, but at heart we were a technology company and we saw an opportunity to use revolutionary technology to create a better customer experience. So he wrote us a check.”

My friend and friend to many, Tom Alberg, has passed away. He was an early investor in Amazon and served on our board for 23 years. Tom was a visionary and also a wonderful, good man. I was so lucky to have you in my life, Tom. We all miss you so much. pic.twitter.com/JsRvxt8rI0

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) August 6, 2022

Alberg stepped down in 2019 after 23 years on Amazon’s board.

“His professional and civic accomplishments were many,” the Amazon CEO said. Andy Jassy He said on his Twitter page on Saturday. “But what impressed me the most was his character – humble, deeply committed, missionary, community-minded – as good a man as they come. He learned a lot from Tom. I will miss him,” he said.

People close to Alberg praised his commitment to the community and his family of five children. He has held leadership roles for the Pacific Science Center, the Intiman Theater and the Technology Alliance. He founded the non-profit Oxbow Farm and Conservation Center and a prestigious winery.

The Microsoft CEO “has had a profound impact on our industry and society through his work, vision and humanity.” Satya Nadella He said on Saturday.

Alberg was active in many organizations until he suffered a stroke last year. Recent roles include involvement with Challenge Seattle, which addresses key regional issues including homelessness and educational inequity.

One of Alberg’s longtime friends and colleagues, Seattle Seahawks chairman John Stanton, a wireless industry veteran and investor, described him as “curious, brutally smart but gentle” in the foreword to Alberg’s 2021 book “Flywheels.”

“As an attorney, executive, board member, investor, and crucially as a social entrepreneur involved in issues ranging from autonomous vehicles to organic agriculture and the challenges of homelessness, Tom is one of the seams that hold Pacific NW together. wrote Stanton, who worked with Alberg at McCaw Cellular.

Announcing Alberg’s death, Madrona’s colleagues wrote, “Tom was simply an amazing man… He had the vision and courage to take risks without seeking fame or recognition for his personal influence.”

Alberg never stopped thinking about what was next. In the early 80s, in the last years of his life, he was writing critiques of the potential of quantum computing, giving studies on the prospect of self-driving cars and writing a book that he saw as necessary. Technology and civic leaders to work together for the common good of their communities.

“He’s just a visionary,” said Challenge Seattle CEO and former Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire in 2015. Think about your vision of the future, maybe there isn’t much we can’t achieve.

Absorption of local roots

In the year Born in 1940, Alberg grew up in what many saw as a sleepy Seattle fueled by lumber and fishing. He graduated from Ballard High School where he was twice class president. He left the city to attend Harvard for an undergraduate degree and in 1965 received a law degree from Columbia University.

He practiced law in New York for a time, but was eager to return to his hometown, which young Alberg felt was more ripe for opportunity than the Big Apple and its entrenched companies and social structure.

Alberg joined what is now Perkins Co. as a general counsel to aviation giants Boeing Co. and Alaska Airlines, as well as early technology companies. Around that time, Alberg was becoming fascinated with consumer technology and was an early adopter of the VCR and the Apple II computer.

“Our home cave was like a futuristic bowl with the equipment,” his son John Alberg said in a previous GeekWire interview.

While an accomplished lawyer, Alberg was drawn to the entrepreneurial spirit by meeting his Swedish paternal grandfather, who had come to America decades earlier. So in the year He moved to Macau Cellular in 1990, first as a lawyer, then as a company leader. Four years later, Macao joined AT&T.

Alberg was not interested in joining a huge bureaucratic company. But he is eager to stay creative. The following year, he made two bold decisions that marked his career and professional status.

1995, a critical year

In the year In 1995, Jeff Bezos, a Seattle newcomer, was looking for investors for his fledgling virtual bookstore. Alberg was one of the people who was approached. Alberg didn’t know much about the Internet, “but I knew some because of Macau, and I thought it was a big deal,” he told GeekWire in a 2020 interview.

With the encouragement of his son John, Alberg invested in Amazon’s seed round and joined its board the following year. Alberg praised Bezos’ contributions when he stepped down from the board after 23 years on the board.

“I will miss his sound judgment, deep business and life experience, and quick wit,” Bezos tweeted at the time. He is a smart business man and an even better person.

Even when he decided to write that game-changing check, Alberg admitted he underestimated Amazon’s potential.

“In the beginning, I don’t think either Jeff or any of us had any idea what Amazon would grow into,” Alberg told GeekWire in 2019. We thought selling books on the Internet had some potential, but the focus was books. . Maybe we can sell CDs, eventually.

But Amazon wasn’t Alberg’s only big bet in 1995. That year, he and three friends — Bill Rackelshaus, a former two-term head of the US EPA and former acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Jerry Grinstein, former CEO of Burlington Northern Railway and Delta; and Perkins Co. partner Paul Goodrich – have teamed up to create what they call Madrona Investment Group, a vehicle that supports other promising Northwest entrepreneurs.

The audacity of the move still surprises Alberg.

“I don’t know why we wanted to take that risk,” Alberg once told GeekWire. The team had the financial potential, but not many resources. “We were somehow thinking, well, let’s make these investments and they might be worth it five years from now,” he recalled.

Madrona Venture Group, as it is now known, has invested in more than 200 early-stage companies, primarily from the Northwest. While some are confused, 24 have gone public and 50 have been involved in mergers and acquisitions. The firm manages $2.4 billion.

Madrona has supported some of the most valuable companies to come out of the region in recent decades, including Smartsheet, Redfin, Apptio, Impinj, Qumulo, Turi, Highspot, SeekOut, Rec Room and others, as well as some startups from outside the region, such as Snowflake.

‘What’s going to happen’

By the late ’90s, Alberg’s bullying of his hometown was beyond Madrona’s reach.

So he teamed up with another list of serious advocates: Bill Gates Sr., father of Microsoft Gates and longtime civic activist, and Tom Cable, investment banker and founding investor of Immunex. They sent letters to friends and colleagues asking them to consider investing in startups. The three actors envisioned a “virtuous spin” where the rich re-energized the startup community by funneling some of it back to local entrepreneurs.

The result was Alliance of Angels, a nationally recognized group and the largest angel investment firm in the Pacific Northwest.

But Alberg’s love for the environment extends beyond its early founders into the woods and fields.

Growing up, he traveled backwoods trails with Boy Scouts and explored the Washington countryside with his father, who bought farmland near the Snoqualmie River and in the Columbia Valley.

He developed a green thumb, and when Alberg had a family of his own, they settled in the gated community of Broadmoor on Lake Washington in one of Seattle’s roughest neighborhoods. Among the quickly landscaped houses, Alberg planted a garden in the backyard, to the dismay of some neighbors but to the delight of his children.

Albergues value summer cruises to the San Juan Islands and the clear waters east of Vancouver Island. The paper-barked Madrona tree, the namesake of Alberg’s investment firm, is symbolic of the islands.

In recent decades, he began to play an important role in managing some of the land bought by his father. His family planted grape vines on their Columbia Valley property, leading to the genesis of Novelty Hill’s Januik Winery. He and his second wife, Judy Beck, years ago turned Snoqualmie’s Oxbow Farm into a nonprofit that caters to school children and grows sustainable crops and native plants.

While technology and agriculture seemed like opposing interests to Alberg, his family saw the line.

His daughter Kathryn Anderson said in 2020: “Everything he does is about what’s going to happen — whether it’s planting a tree that hasn’t matured in 80 years or investing in driverless cars. It’s just believing in something that hasn’t happened yet.”

Alberg is survived by his wife, Judy Beck; The children Robert, Catherine, John, Carson and Jessica; and his four grandchildren. The family requests that donations be made in Alberg’s name to Oxbow Farm and Conservation Center.